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Harvard Pilgrim and why brands need to listen on social media

In 2013, almost a decade after the founding of Facebook and seven years after the founding of Twitter, companies that aren’t listening to and participating in the social conversation do so at their own peril.

I recently suffered a retina tear in one eye on the weekend and, much to my surprise, my previously-great insurance company doesn’t want to pay for the effective, emergency treatment I received to fix it and prevent it from possibly becoming a detached retina. (Readers in the UK: this denial of coverage can happen in the U.S.)

After several weeks of conversations, I hand-delivered a letter to the office of the CEO of the insurance company, expecting at least a response and possibly a swift resolution.

When I hadn’t even received confirmation of the letter in more than a week, late last Thursday afternoon I posted it to my blog and socialized the link through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

My blog doesn’t have quite the traffic that the Econsultancy blog does. Typically I have 0-10 readers a day, while my posts for Econsultancy are read by a few thousand people.

So I was more than a little surprised the next morning when I checked Google Analytics and found that 500 people had looked at the post in less than eight hours late on Thursday, and a steady stream of people were in the process of reading it Friday morning.

When I drilled down deeper, I found the source of this traffic: a link had been posted on Universalhub.com, a popular news site for Boston, and on Reddit.

And the post was getting dozens of comments on UniversalHub, Reddit, Facebook, and my blog. Here’s one example:

Wow, that’s ridiculous! I have Harvard Pilgrim. It never occurred to me that their lack of weekend hours means that one is not supposed to seek emergency care during that time! I am going to call and ask some questions. Good reason to switch plans next year if there is an affordable alternative.

Amazingly, even though I used the @HarvardPilgrim twitter handle of the insurance company in my tweets, the company seemed oblivious to the fact that this critical conversation about it was happening.

On Friday, more than 500 additional people read the post, making the total more than 1,000 people in about 36 hours, with dozens of them taking the time to post often-negative comments. But Harvard Pilgrim did not even respond to my tweet of the link on Twitter, something that it should have instantly been aware of Thursday afternoon.

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is not a small company. It provides health insurance to over 1m people in New England, and has won multiple awards. But it appears to not have even rudimentary social listening and responding efforts in place.

This is not the case at other major companies that regularly monitor and participate in the social conversation. Companies have found social media to be an effective channel to market, increase sales, provide customer support, and build their brand.

When Google announced at the end of September that Hummingbird had been live for a month or so, many questioned how such a significant change could have happened without it having been detected earlier.

Amit Singhal, Head of Google’s ranking team, talked about Hummingbird being the first time a completely new algorithm had been implemented since 2001 and that it impacted 90% of search queries.

However, the visible impact of this algorithm change has been less significant than many recent algorithm updates, such as the May 2012 Penguin update.

To begin I’m going to repeat a headline I read last week: ‘Facebook is more popular for native advertising than Twitter’.

This headline derives from Hexagram’s latest report on native advertising. The report elaborates: Facebook is the third most-popular channel for native advertising, with Twitter still lagging far behind.

However… if you’re anything like me, you might not know what native advertising actually is, and all of the above information may just merge into the background of data white noise.

As a relative newcomer to the digital marketing world, I’ve decided to begin a series of ‘beginner’s guides’ to uncover what is meant by certain terms, trends and technological advances in digital; being both a travel guide and a personal investigation.

So if you’re tired of being the person nodding and smiling at the back of the room, feeling increasingly powerless in the face of overwhelming jargon, come with me and we’ll embark on a voyage of discovery together.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to me or look me in the eye, you just have to sit there.

Facebook provides an unparalleled amount of real-time, accurate user data. With Facebook, marketers can be flies on the wall, quietly and unobtrusively gaining insight into their consumers by observing the details they share about their lives.

It is the world’s largest unfiltered focus group for brands to listen to, and it’s arguably the richest CRM database for marketers to take advantage of.

Consumers provide large amounts of data through their Facebook activities, enabling marketers to access far more information about who they are than a survey or poll might reveal. And, thanks to the high-frequency of consumer activity on Facebook, all of this wonderfully rich data is consistently kept up to date.

Best of all, the accessibility of consumer data on Facebook means that marketers can utilize it without interfering in their consumers’ lives.

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.